


Had To Learn From Somewhere

by Tmae



Category: DragonFable
Genre: Gen, Mysteriiioooouuuusss Narrator, second person narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-20
Updated: 2016-08-20
Packaged: 2018-08-09 23:24:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7821361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tmae/pseuds/Tmae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everybody learns everything they know from <i>somewhere</i>. This holds no less true for Falconreach's Mad Magical Weaponsmith.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Had To Learn From Somewhere

When you step through the door into a building that should be empty, the very first thing you notice is that a chill runs up your back and you have the unmistakable sense of not being alone.

For a moment, your hand tightens around the door handle, your magic flickers up to your other hand in preparation for a threat, and then the familiarity of the sensation registers and you sigh. The magic flickers away from your fingers and you run the hand down your face, sighing heavily.

You walk further into your shop, letting the door swing shut behind you, and take note of the things out of place as you approach the counter. 

There are five books missing from their place on the display bookshelf. Two of them are sitting on the counter, one of them is sitting on a pedestal in the corner underneath a floating orb, and another is under the head of a large fake snake…whose eyes are closed. Which is slightly worrying. You’ll need to check that snake is still fake.

The fifth book is nowhere to be seen.

You set the keys down on the counter, settle the flowers you went out to get – they only bloom at midnight under moonlight, how inconvenient is that? – down on the surface and turn around, leaning against the ribcage-high piece of furniture as you examine what else is out of place to ascertain the location of your visitor.

One of the practice dummies is halfway across the room from where it was when you left, and it is certainly not the one that is alive so it didn’t make it there on its own. One of the large vases of flowers is leaning against the wall, balanced on the edge of its base and with the lip caught in a slight dent. There is a single muddy footprint splattered on the wall.

You sigh, again, and walk around the counter. Two thick, heavy ropes, just ever so slightly gold in colour, hang in the corner. You grab one in your hand, turn around and look up as you pull.

The curtains across the roof swish as they pull apart, revealing the rafters, and sure enough, nestled there as naturally as a squirrel, is a boy with the fifth missing book in his lap. How he is reading it in the relative darkness up there and the mop of hair in his eyes, you don’t know.

You pointedly clear your throat and the six year old shifts, setting the book down on the rafter and turning to peer around one and look down at you.  
“Get down from there,” you say.

He sighs in a way that most children wouldn’t learn how to for another decade and turns around. He picks up the book, snaps it shut, holds it to his chest and then rolls off the edge of the rafter.

A year ago, you would have reacted with shock and possibly yelled. You would have rushed to get close enough to try and catch him, reached out your magic to do the same.

But it is not a year ago and you are far too used to him to really react at all.

Sure enough, despite coming off of the rafter horizontally, he lands on his feet. It is an almost noiseless landing, other than a slight _thud_ as his feet hit the floor and the _shuff_ of his tunic as it settles. There is dried mud caked over his boots, which explains the footprint but not the lack of other ones.

You let go of the rope you are holding and turn around, giving the other one a quick tug to close the curtains over again. In the space of time it takes you to do so, the boy makes it to the counter and somehow climbs on top of something that is twice his height.

At least, you assume that that is what happened, as you turn around to find him sitting cross-legged on top of it, grinning widely.

“Here you go!” he chirps, holding out the book he is holding.

He was quite clearly not finished with it when you found him, so you push it back gently.

“You can return it when you’re finished with it,” you say.

“I _have_ ,” he insists, pushing the book back towards you. “I read the whole thing but then I decided to read it again,”

You wonder why he read this one in particular again when there are four other books that he clearly read as well scattered around, but don’t say anything. Instead, you nod and take the book, tucking it under your arm without looking at the title.

“Do your parents know that you’re out?” you ask. 

“Uh…no?” he answers, sounding a little bit sheepish and rocking back on his heels. “I kinda couldn’t sleep and wanted to read so I…”

“Just got up and left?” you finish, raising an eyebrow.

He nods. You sigh.

“You should get home then,” you say, giving the boy a stern look. “Your parents have had more than enough midnight scares from your wanders, don’t you think?”

For a moment, there is an expression on his face that looks like a mixture of grief, anger and annoyance, but that moment lasts for such a short time that you find yourself wondering if you imagined it. The expression on the boy’s face when he answers you has nothing more than sheepishness and maybe a little resignation.

“Yes,” he replies, sighing the word and looking moments from flat out huffing.

“So, you’re going to…?” you prompt.

“Go home,” he replies, scuffing a single muddy boot against the floor and looking for all the world like a chastised child – though, you realise a moment after thinking the thought, there shouldn’t be a ‘like’ in there, as he is, in fact, a chastised child.

“And I’m not going to see you again until the sun is high in the sky, because you’ll be at home and not giving your parents heart attacks,” you say.

The boy nods gravely and traces a cross over his heart with his index finger. Then he spins himself around on the counter and hops off the other side. This time, you don’t take your eyes off him as he moves, watching him until he reaches the door. It’s that you don’t trust him to not touch anything on his way out, it’s just that…well, okay, fine, you don’t trust him to not touch anything on his way out. Six year olds are naturally curious and there’s a lot of stuff in here that looks like it should be touched when it really shouldn’t.

“Bye, Mr Savatier!” he says from the door.

“Goodbye, Cysero,” you reply, just a second after he shuts it.

There is a sound that is almost… _slithery_ and you glance over to where one of the books was under the head of the snake. The snake is gone.

Well. That answers your question about whether or not it was still fake then, doesn’t it?

You cross through from the shop to the living area in the back, set the book down on your kitchen table, and start looking for a way to catch the thing.

* * *

It takes approximately fifteen minutes to catch the not-so-fake-anymore snake. Once you are certain that it isn’t going to cause any damage or harm, you find yourself back in your kitchen. You sit down at the table with a mug of warm fruit juice cupped in your hands. Most would go for tea or coffee, but you have never quite developed a taste for the former and the latter is always… _odd_ , to you. It almost doesn’t taste of anything, really, in the same way that the water used to make it doesn’t. At the same time, it almost seems to taste of everything at once. It’s an incredibly disconcerting experience, so you rarely drink it. So. Warmed fruit juice it is.

The book that Cysero was reading earlier sits on the table in front of you. It is about as thick as your arm, with gold lettering on a dark blue cover declaring it to be _The Encyclopaedia of Mysterious Magical Creatures._ Had it been any other six year old reading it, you would have though they just wanted to look at the pictures, perhaps to practice reading on a few of the words, but it wasn’t any other six year old, it was Cysero. And you can’t help but wonder… and maybe worry a little bit.

Cysero is… an odd child, to be sure. He has far more interest and fascination in magic than you ever would have expected, knowing his parents. There are days when the fact that he is the son of the town’s blacksmith is abundantly clear – he walks in covered in soot from lingering around the forges on those days – but there are others where you would never guess it. For all that the boy seems abundantly interested in his father’s profession, you would still be more likely to spot him on the roof of the forge than inside it.

You only moved into town a year past, so you don’t really have that much experience with him beyond that timeframe, but your neighbours all seem to have more than their fair share of stories. He was apparently a very noisy baby, crying all hours of the day and night, for “the entire first year of his life”. You have a feeling that this is probably exaggeration, but then, you’ve never really had experience with children that young. Apparently, after his first birthday he started calming down, before going all but completely silent on his third, despite having learned how to talk and talk well by then. It had been a development that had concerned everyone who had grown used to how loud he was, but no healer had ever found anything wrong. After that, according to your neighbours, he had been a mostly quiet and reserved child.

Until you showed up.

You remember your first weeks in town incredibly clearly. You had forever felt like you were being watched but hadn’t been able to put a finger on _why_ – and though the logical conclusion would be that someone was watching you, you had never been able to spot a _who._

It had gotten to the point that you had asked one of your neighbours, a fellow shopkeeper, if there had been a history of hauntings in town, or if there were any other magical creatures in the area known for such things.

She had laughed and told you there wasn’t anything like that but that you were, in fact, being watched, and left you with the cryptic remark that “I haven’t seen him quite this lively or engaged for almost three years. I don’t know how you caught his attention, he’s usually so skittish around new people, but keep it up,”

That just left you even more confused than before.

Three days later you spotted a flash of green and brown as someone ducked behind a tree when you turned around without warning. Checking behind the tree had revealed… nothing but the back of the trunk, but looking up had revealed a five year old clinging to the third lowest branch like a sloth. He had grinned when you spotted him and declared “I thought it’d take you longer!”  
After that, finding him hanging around places – literally or metaphorically – just became a fact of life for you.

* * *

A day after Cysero was in your shop reading _The Encyclopaedia of Mysterious Magical Creatures_ , he comes barrelling out of the woods with a two-headed puppy in tow.

He looks as absolutely innocent as a child can when there’s a two-headed puppy with glowing red eyes drooling on his arms from where he’s holding it and asks, tone as pleading as he can, “Can I keep it?”

The unanimous consensus is that no. No, he cannot keep it.

* * *

He tries to sneak a baby splashy in two days later. This time, you intercept him before he makes it into town and tell him in no uncertain terms that he’s not going to be allowed to keep any of the magical creatures he saw in the book as pets and that he’d better take it back to its parent before something bad happens. Splashys, you know, only live in a spring with the purest water in Lore. You also know that that place is nowhere near here. You don’t bother wondering how on earth he found the baby splashy in the first place, though it would certainly be a less worrying thing to wonder about than how he found the puppy.

He does take the splashy back but he also tells you that “I’ll have them as pets someday,”

You just hope that the someday is after he’s out of adolescence.

* * *

A letter arrives for you a year and a half after you moved to town. It isn’t addressed to “Mr Savatier” or “Mr I. Savatier” like most of your mail these days is. It’s addressed to “Iou Savatier”, which is what tips you off to the fact that it’s from your parents before you even open it.

Cysero sees the envelope a few days later. 

“Your first name is _Iou?_ ” he asks, sounding somewhere torn between incredulous and delighted.

He barely stifles something that might have been a laugh when you nod an affirmative.

* * *

Your parents arrive three days later, having almost outpaced their letter that said they were coming. The visit is fairly short, has nothing of particular note occur during it really, but for the fact that you barely see Cysero at all during the time. It’s almost disconcerting, only catching glimpses of him for a week and a half, only realising that he’s near when you feel the sensation of being watched, when you have grown so used to him just appearing all of the time. 

You are beginning to understand what people meant when they said that Cysero is skittish around new people.

You are at the market with them when the feeling feels stronger than it has for a while, and a discrete glance around reveals a flash of green fabric and brown hair as he disappears round the corner of a stall. You move to excuse yourself from the conversation you had been having with your father, but at that exact moment your mother calls “John! Come and have a look at this!”, thus doing the job for you. When he moves over to the other stall to see whatever it is, you slip around the back of the stall just in case Cysero is still there.

He isn’t.

The sensation of being watched doesn’t come back for the rest of their visit.

* * *

The morning after they leave, however, Cysero shows up just as usual. You unlock the shop door, turn the ‘closed’ sign to say ‘open’, return to the counter, crouch down to retrieve a number of things from under it, and when you stand up again, Cysero has his arms crossed over the counter and is staring at you.

The bell over the door never rang. You don’t even startle.

“Hello,” you greet him, placing the items you retrieved down on the counter one by one “I haven’t seen you in a while,”

Glancing over the edge of the counter confirms that he hasn’t found and dragged a stool or anything over to stand and, and he is in fact just hanging off the edge of the counter, holding himself up just with the arms folding on its surface. You don’t know how he reached to get up there in the first place, but he probably jumped.

“Your dad’s name is _John,”_ he says, rather than greeting you in return.

You nod, but raise an eyebrow even as you do so. 

He grins a familiar grin and you move the logbook – one of the things you retrieved from under the counter – to the side so that it won’t get knocked down. Cysero does exactly as you expect and clambers up onto the counter completely. His legs now crossed in place of his arms and a hand on each kneecap, he is practically vibrating with the excitement of… something. For all that you have grown to know the boy over the course of the past year-and-a-half, there are still some things about him that are just odd that you don’t know if you’ll ever understand.

“So…” he stars, grinning in such a way that you have a feeling that his eyes are _glittering_ behind the curtain of hair hiding them. “You could say that…”

He leans forwards, as though about to impart something of great importance.

“…you’re _Mister Iou S. John’s son?_ ” the grin is outright _manic_ as he says it, though his reason is completely incomprehensible to you.

“Yes, I suppose you could say that,” you say, and somehow the grin gets _more_ manic. You poke him in the leg with a pencil “Off the counter,”

He complies and then wanders off to explore something. Approximately point five seconds after he disappears from sight behind a bookshelf, the sound of flat out cackling fills the shop and you roll your eyes, returning to your work.

* * *

There is a lot that happens after that, but the next thing of particular note to occur happens when it is approaching you having been in town for two years.  
Cysero drops from the roof of the bakers onto the road in front of you like some kind of ninja, holds up a book on magic from your shop, points at the title, and says “Teach me,”

“No. You’re too young,” you reply, the same way that you have the last time he asked the question, and the time before that, and the time before that. The request itself is nothing of note, just the boy’s method of entrance.

“My birthday is in six days. Teach me _then_ ,” he insists “Seven is definitely old enough to learn! I asked my parents!”

He isn’t wrong. Seven isn’t really considered too young to learn, not with the number of orders that take on apprentices that young. Admittedly, there are also those who start learning at six or even as young as five, but they are few enough in number that you could put it off this long.

“Ask me again on your birthday,” you tell him “I’ll tell you the answer then,”

* * *

He asks you again on his birthday. In front of his parents. _Loudly._ They give permission, and you’ve been thinking it over, so this time you have no problem saying yes.

On the condition, of course, that he promises to listen to you when you tell him what to do regarding magic and he is responsible with what he learns.  
He promises.

So. That’s how you start teaching Cysero how to use magic.

* * *

One week after you start out teaching him, Cysero manages to reduce a table to sawdust using what was supposed to be a simple wind manipulation method used for dusting. In a way, you suppose, he _did_ use it for dusting, just not the type of dusting usually _meant_ by the word.

He stares at it in shock and you abruptly realise that he’s a _lot_ more powerful that you had previously thought. Maybe you shouldn’t have put off teaching him for so long. It might have been easier to help him learn to control it when he was younger. Or it might have been even harder. There’s no point on dwelling on what ifs when there’s a nearly-panicking seven year old in the room with you.

You help him to calm down, assure him it wasn’t his fault, no harm done, but nevertheless cross ‘Candle lighting exercise’ off the list of things you had been considering teaching him over the course of the month. You’re not letting him anywhere near fire until he has better control. _Much_ better control.

* * *

Cysero is an odd child. It is a simple fact of life, as true as the sky being blue and the grass being green. Some days he is overly childish, some days he almost seems older than everyone around him. His family has never, to their knowledge, produced a mage before, and yet his magic is some of the strongest that you have ever encountered – and some of the most unpredictable. An odd child and something of a wealth of paradoxes.

He’s absolutely a diligent student though, and you find yourself glad that he asked you to teach him. It’s…nice, being able to watch him grow in his understanding of magic and himself. Somehow it feels like this may be the only thing that he can be taught that he doesn’t already know, though you aren’t sure why that is. It’s also nice to know that he asked you to teach him because he wanted to know what you specifically could teach him, not just because you’re the nearest mage that he knows – he told you as much himself, though not quite in those words. (His wording was more along the lines of “The magic you do for the stuff in your shop is _fun_. I want to know the fun stuff, and how to make people laugh and things! Other mages all do boring stuff,” but it’s the meaning that counts)

He’s an odd child and in all likelihood he’ll be an odd adult as well. But there is something else that he is going to be that you can already see in him now.

He’s going to be _great._

Cysero will grow up to be a great man. To you, this is as simple a fact as him being odd or the grass being green.

Of course, the moment that you think this is the moment that there is a bright flash of light, a startled yelp, and you abruptly find a living sock puppet clinging to your face. Once you get it off, you end up finding yourself chasing it around the shop while a seven year old tries to help at the same time as explaining that _it was an accident I didn’t mean to sorry!_ and exclaiming _that is so cool do you think I could do it again?_

He’ll be a great man, you have no doubt, but some days you wonder what exactly he’ll be great _at._

**Author's Note:**

> If ever you wonder about just how strong my love of puns is, remember that I spent months writing this entire fic _solely_ for that pun about Mysterious Johnson's name.
> 
> Well, at first, then I liked little kid Cysero as well. But mostly the pun.


End file.
